The Oh’s: Top Whatever, pt. 6: Bad MonkeyX

This week makes 10 years that I’ve been doing this MonkeyX “writing about music on the internet” thing – from the very start of the Ohs to the end. It started as a website-magazine, turned into a blog, changed names once or twice, blah dee blah, and here we are. Ta da! Here’s what it looked like ten years ago, roughly. I don’t have the files for the first issue – this was number 3.

It was all hand-coded, if you can believe that – all written in HTML in WordPad. I had regular “columns” I tried to touch on each issue: new stuff I was reviewing, broad looks at entire careers, old records that everyone in the world needed to hear, overlooked works of genius, reviews of books about music, and the odd editorial. A couple of friends helped out, fading in and out, and James Andean wrote a ton of stuff, and he was way smarter than me. It lasted for a few years and then crashed into a wall. I dabbled with different ideas for a couple years and finally landed on this blog, which stuck. Happy birthday to us, MonkeyX. You’re definitely one of the best parts of my musical decade.

In honour of this unexpected staying power, I’m rechristening this blog to include its “bad” roots. Ta da!

I just checked the Wayback Machine, and there’s a fair amount of the old stuff there. I like the old comic look. There are a bunch of reviews I never reuploaded after making the switch to the second edition. I’m linking to it all here for the record.